Open Music Archive offers a collection of eighteen new recordings for
publication and distribution in Undoing Property? The project identifies a gap in the present legal reality in order to obtain public access
to sonic materials before they are closed down by impending changes
to legislation. It extracts elements that are common, and forms part of
an ongoing project to collect and freely distribute copyright-expired
music recordings.

Source material for the project is gleaned from the edges of the
public domain with a specific focus on audio material from early commercial releases presenting a divide in ownership between lyrics and
musical composition—two discreet and essential elements of modern
popular music and the subject of countless legal disputes throughout
the history of the recording industry. This split exists in UK copyright
law, and offers an opportunity for elements of material to be released
once divorced.

New sonic sequences have been generated from archival
recordings, which have been edited, redacted, cut-up, and processed
to suppress copyright-secured elements, thus enabling the release
of public domain layers from the proprietary control of commercial
publishers.

Retrieved from the recesses of the British Library and beyond,
recordings from the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s have been dug out from
record company back catalogues. Recordings have been altered and
encoded using pervasive digital processing techniques ported from
pop, R & B, and hip-hop. Melodic phrases are scrambled or reduced
to a monotone and lyrics are flipped and reversed, rendered incomprehensible, to bypass legal frameworks and enable unrestricted
playback.

Phonetic reversal and backmasking—techniques conventionally used to censor words or phrases in rap recordings for radio
broadcast, or historically used to encode subliminal messages on vinyl
releases—are here used to redact recordings with lyrics still under
copyright control. Elsewhere, reedits strip the vocal content out of
a recording—intros, outros, and instrumental sections are re-spliced
to open out and free melodic layers. Vocal production technologies
of vocoder and autotune are folded back into their original military
functions of speech coding and encryption in order to suppress
controlled melodic elements and release copyright-expired lyrics.

This processing allows recordings of songs—such as the 1924
song “Golden Days,” not scheduled to return to the public domain
until 2022 (perhaps to a future world suffering overpopulation and
depleted resources as depicted in the 1973 film
Soylent Green), or the
1937 song “Sentimental and Melancholy,” whose copyright is due to
expire in 2047 (the same year rescue vessel
Lewis and Clark
answers
a distress signal from starship
Event Horizon) — to be released in part,
right now in 2013.

We must remember that the legal frameworks that define the
limits of the public domain are not fixed. The future of the public domain
is precarious—the field of culture is increasingly colonized for private
interests as proprietors of intellectual property continually lobby for
the extension of their control. We are well aware that intellectual property has been declared the oil of the twenty-first century.

On September 12, 2011, following aggressive lobbying by
private interests, the Council of the European Union adopted an
extension of the term of copyright in sound recordings. The British
government is using this opportunity to bring other elements of
copyright law under tighter control. These upcoming legal enclosures
are due to take effect across Europe in late 2013: some public
material will be returned to proprietary ownership, in other cases,
material on the threshold of escape will be forced under control for
a further twenty years.

In response to this moment we offer a “record catalogue”:
a collection of newly processed recordings that are freely published
and distributed online. This timely and urgent action ensures that
copyright-expired recorded lyrics and melodies are distributed
publicly while still free.

Source manuscripts and recordings for this collection are currently scheduled for full release into the UK public domain between
2018 and 2069. Here, we present a series of prerelease leaks for free
distribution. Audio has been hacked for the present legal reality.
Download and listen to the recordings at:www.openmusicarchive.org/undoingproperty

The material is distributed under a copyleft license for future reuse.